Obviously, you are free to vote in any way you like and (thus far) with confidence that the privacy of your vote is sacrosanct. I would guess that most people vote, if not logically, at least consistently. For some people, it is important to punish wasteful nodes. For other people, it is important to reward particularly thoughtful or detailed nodes. For some, it is important to seek out and upvote the nodes of prominent community members. For others, it is important to seek out and downvote those same nodes.

Perhaps the community is large enough at this point that the inconsistent and illogical votes are mere outliers. Unfortunately, it seems like there has been a steady appearance of posts by recipients of a downvote or two (or ten, more rarely), requesting that the privacy of voting be overturned or that downvoting be limited to those who know what to do with them. Wherein the implicit idea is that there is someone out there more qualified to make that judgment, and the poster would perhaps be willing to volunteer some time out of his or her busy day to pass a few judgments.

This concept has already been encapsulated in the voting/experience system though. New users simply cannot do much damage. They can't vote you down multiple times. They don't have many votes. The system is robust enough that in the aggregate, good posts go up and bad posts go down.

This is not to say the system doesn't have problems. The most obvious problem is the observed behavior of visible posts (e.g. root nodes) receiving a disproportionate number of upvotes. I'd be interested to hear proposals about how to subtract the influence of node placement and timing from the voting process.

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